Fragments of Impact – early feedback and thanks
There’s more to come on the results of the recent Fragments of Impact event in Istanbul – the current plan is to write the projects up properly as soon as we can a) find people who can write effectively on this topic or b) find the time ourselves to sit and write. (Volunteers welcome…)
But. On Friday I got an email from one participant who had headed straight from the third day of the workshop, when we were working on how to develop conclusions with multiple stakeholder groups and build interventions, to Ecuador to work with the people involved in one of his projects. Tom van Steen of VECO emailed last week:
On our behalf, I am happy to share with you that we have conducted a first joint analysis workshop (as simulated on the third day of our gathering) with our team in Ecuador. Despite some initial resistance to the completely novel workshop methodologies, participants (young farmer leaders, NGOs, government (national+local), private sector and VECO staff, 25 in total) left rather thrilled and with lots of energy to keep the work going.
Our local teams also know how to use the software for analysis of the data and will continue collecting some more stories to have a more complete dataset, which will then be the basis for a more fully fledged analysis workshop.
A blogpost is in the making and will be shared as soon as ready!
Fantastic news – although, knowing the VECO team Tom and Steff, it’s hardly a surprise! They are, after all, the team that pulled together the recent SenseMaker® practitioners’ knowledge exchange in Leuven, Belgium – a report here. And watch their blog for that post.
And at the end of the three days in Istanbul, I forgot to do one all-important thing. To thank all the people who’d made it happen:
- the many individuals in country who worked so hard to collect materials;
- Milica Begovic and Khatuna Sandroshvilli at UNDP who mentored people and supported the programme from their respective offices in Istanbul and Tbilisi;
- Richard Hare for the technical know-how and patience to build around 20 different SenseMaker® collection websites and apps, most in languages that made no sense to him;
- Anna Hanchar and Meg Odling-Smee for coordinating and supporting country teams with every element – a tough task given how many different moving parts there were.
Thank you all!
